[geeks] food geekery question

[Phil Stracchino]

gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> The Kenwood was first made in the 1950's by an Englishman named Kenneth Wood,
> the Chef is a realtively new model. AFAIK it has very few plastic parts,
> but may have some nylon (which IMHO is not plastic) gears inside. 

Nylon, by you, is not plastic?

> As for being underpowered, last week when I was making a loaf of bread from
> 2 kilo of flour, (1 kilo white bread flour, 1 kilo rye), I made a mistake.
> I normally mix the dry ingredients with the regular beater and then
> switch to the dough hook after I add enough water and it thickens.
> 
> I waited too long and broke the beater. It literally was so powerful that it
> broke the composite metal in half.

"composite metal"?  I strongly doubt a consumer electric mixer had a
beater made of metal-matrix composite, so I'm assuming that when you say
"composite metal" you're talking either part-metal, part-plastic
construction, or some kind of pot-metal die-casting alloy such as mazac.
 In either case, I find it difficult to be impressed that the beater
eventually broke, particularly when every electric mixer I've ever seen
that has both a regular beater and a dough hook (including KitchenAid)
says "Don't mix bread dough or other heavy mixtures with the regular
beater, you'll break the beater.  That's what the dough hook is for."

> Note that my 500 watt Kitchen Aid would not do such a thing, with much less
> flour, it would walk across the counter and drop the bowl (it had a lever to
> raise the bowl into place,not a drop down motor).

I don't think my wife ever got her KitchenAid to "walk".

By the way ... when you're talking about KitchenAids being
"underpowered", one thing to keep in mind when you're comparing power
ratings on mixers is that not only are they  not all rated the same,
they're not all rated the same *way*.  Most mixers and other kitchen
appliances are rated by their gross power drain at the wall socket.  The
two exceptions I can think of are microwave ovens (rated by the
continuous output power of the magnetron) and KitchenAids, which have
always been rated by net output shaft power.  This comes from the
KitchenAid's commercial origins as "KitchenAid by Hobart" - it was
basically a half-scale Hobart C-100 commercial mixer, originally
designed as a portable demo unit.  A "600W" KitchenAid does not draw
600W at the wall outlet, it puts 600W - 0.8HP - on its output shaft (1HP
= 746W, remember).  With the average 500W-at-the-wall-socket kitchen
mixer, you're doing well if you get 0.5HP net at the output shaft after
electrical and mechanical losses.

Either way, the ability to break the beater by trying to mix dough with
it (even accidentally) really says a lot less about the power of the
mixer than about trying to use the beater to do a job it wasn't designed
for.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.